Best of the blog 2007 2 Jan 2008

January

January saw riots in Tonga, political crisis in Taiwan and unrest in Oaxaca, but here's what was occupying our minds during America's National Soup Month:

iPod vending machines

The trusty old vending machine was firmly back in fashion at the turn of the year. A trend headed by Apple's slick iPod vendor.

Multi-touch vs. multi-gesture

The iPhone's multi-touch user interface raised interesting questions about the importance of tactile feedback, but Microsoft Research took the discussion to a whole new level by asking "What if you could interact without touching anything at all?"

Bringing something new to the table

Wouter Scheublin's incredible walking table was the talk of Dutch Design Week in Eindhoven.

February

February was cyclone season in many parts of the world, but here's what we were wittering on about during what the Anglo-Saxon's called "Solmoneth" ("mud month"):

Mustang's must see billboards

Ian Hart reinvented the humble billboard to produce some great advertising concepts for the Ford Mustang. Hart proposed constructing billboards from GE Lexan EXL semi-transparent resin, a material that creates a blur (and thus the illusion of speed) as you look through it.

Walmart say download Godzilla, but not with Mozilla

Walmart launched a video download service that didn't work in Firefox - which was a shame when you consider that Firefox users are exactly the type of tech-savvy early adopters that would have been prepared to use such a service. D'oh!

Dell customers demand Linux (?)

Dell customers said they wanted to see Microsoft Windows, Office and Internet Explorer replaced by Linux, OpenOffice and Firefox. But was this really what they wanted?

March

March saw Ghana celebrate its golden jubilee, but here's what caught our attention during Filipino Fire Prevention Month:

Wonderbra's wonder-ad

How to turn a relatively bland advertising campaign into a viral sensation in one easy step...

Newspapers adopt Web 2.0 tag clouds

Tag clouds made the leap from internet to print media. Yet another example of Web 2.0 entering the public consciousness...

What's the URL? Search me!

Rather than relying upon people to remember their URLs, a number of companies in Japan started using "Search Me" ads to promote their wares...

April

April saw NASA release the first 3D images of the sun, but here's what we were writing about during the second month of the year (according to the Roman calendar):

Guerrilla usability

Press button. Receive bacon. It's that simple!

Standing on the shoulders of giants

Seemed like everyone was experimenting with mashups back in April. But was this really a wise idea?

Sunshine

How director Danny Boyle used muted colours to create a unique experience for moviegoers...

Opera's speed dial

The latest version of Opera hit the shelves at the start of this month, complete with an interesting new "Speed Dial" feature.

Microsoft's "Internet of things"

Microsoft continued to blur the boundary between the digital and physical worlds in its attempt to create "an internet of things". Exciting stuff...

May

May saw more than 20 countries agree to work together to end bottom sea trawling, but here's what we were posting about during New Zealand's Music Month:

Commerce Bank's useless icons

"Rose = Logoff. What could be more logical?!"

Highway wind farms

A student from Arizona State University may just have struck gold with this idea...

Warm - Hot - Very hot

It's just a picture of an old temperature gauge, but people seemed to like it...

Jamie Wieck's growing business card

Another blooming designer...with the business card to prove it. Just add water...

June

Did you know that no other month begins on the same day of the week as June? Did you care? Probably not. Anyway, here's what was on our minds during June:

Apple not good for the web?

During his keynote at WWDC, Steve Jobs revealed an interesting - and perhaps disturbing - glimpse of Apple's vision of the future. (Be sure to check out the comments associated with this post for some interesting debate).

On the squareness of milk containers

Ever wondered why DVDs come in larger packages than CDs, when both types of disc are exactly the same size?

Amazing Lego n' milk 3D scanner

Does exactly what it says on the tin. Genius! (Our most visited post of the year).

July

Here's what we were blabbering on about during what the Welsh refer to as "Gorffennaf", which means "end of the summer" (Sheesh! If July really does mark the end of warm weather, trips to the beach and ice cream, then Lord help us!):

Windows Vista has ruined Alt+Tab

Despite looking a lot flashier, Alt+Tab is a lot less usable in Windows Vista than it is in XP.

Open Addict blocks Internet Explorer users

Popular open source advocacy website Open Addict began blocking Internet Explorer users from viewing its newly designed homepage. Not a good decision in our opinion.

A great example of bad dialog box design

Another of those posts that does exactly what it says on the tin.

August

August saw Indonesia boycott an Asian Karate championship in Malaysia in protest at the beating of one of its official referees by the local police, but here's what captured our imagination during the month that David Poltz recommends getting rid of:

Content-aware image resizing

Dr. Ariel Shamir conjured up a software application that resizes photos in such a way that the content of the image is preserved intelligently. (It's truly incredible).

The Safe Bedside Table

When not in use it looks like your average bedside table, but during a break-in it can be converted into a fearsome club and shield combo!

Twitter's customer support form

Twitter began eliciting more useful information from its customers by providing three fields for the price of one.

Tenori-On: A new digital instrument

It's a 16 x 16 LED matrix that's sensitive to the touch and can recognise simple physical gestures.

Two Brix are better than one

What if you could combine mobile phones (Lego-stylee) to get more screen real estate? Well, then you'd have Seok won Hong's "Brix"...

September

In September, a study published by a team of US and Czech researchers claimed that there was a 90% chance that the object that caused the Chicxulub crater in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula - and that probably led to the extinction of the dinosaurs - came from the Baptistina family of asteroids. Which is what we'd been telling people for years (ahem). Anyway, here's the best of our blog posts from the month in which Usenet users have been living since 1993 (and will continue to live in for all eternity apparently):

"Click here"

Many usability professionals recommend avoiding the use of link labels like "click here" - usually on the basis that they aren't descriptive enough. But new research suggested that such advice may be based more on subjective taste than on hard data.

Website terms incorporated by "Continue" button

A US Court of Appeal ruled that websites can incorporate terms into a contract via a "continue" button alone (i.e. without requiring users to click on a checkbox to explicitly agree to the site's conditions of use first).

Post-it art

The trusty Post-it note: once a productivity tool, now a medium for art. Take a look at our gallery of stick-on masterpieces.

October

October saw Russia celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the launch of Sputnik 1, but here's what we were banging on about during the month in which Squirrel Appreciation Week takes place:

The sleazy practice of internal linking

Jeremy Wagstaff bemoaned sites that link to themselves rather than out to external websites. It got (and still gets) our goat too.

Amazon's 1-click patent decimated by dark armies of Sauron

Most of the claims set out in Amazon's controversial 1-Click patent were rejected by the US Patent Office in October. This decision followed a long campaign by New Zealander Peter Calveley - a motion capture performer who appeared as part of Sauron's evil armies in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy!

The WWF's ingenious paper towel dispenser

Those crazy wrestlers took a break from the ring to raise our awareness of green issues with another stellar ad campaign ;-)

Blind shoppers win the right to sue Target

It had been a long wait for developments in the "National Federation for the Blind vs. Target" accessibility row (a 13-month wait, in fact). However, early in October, Target finally lost its bid to dismiss the NFB's lawsuit.

The new advertising outlet

Reports suggested that large businesses were abandoning television commercials and glossy magazine spreads in favour of creating "interactive experiences" for their customers. Case in point: Nike, a company that spent only 33 percent of its $678m US advertising budget on traditional forms of advertising in the previous financial year.

Unk-unks

You probably remember the infamous "known unknown" speech that Donald Rumsfeld made in 2002. Well, it turns out that, despite the ridicule he received, good ol' Don was actually quoting an accepted project management theory.

Listen up music industry: "Inconvenience doesn't scale"

Oh Snap! Yahoo! Music's VP of Product Development, Ian Rogers, gave music industry bigwigs a lesson on user experience.

Blind boy masters echolocation

When Ben Underwood lost his eyes to cancer at the tender age of three, he didn't just lie down and accept his fate. He taught himself echolocation (the navigation technique used by bats and dolphins) and in doing so managed to restore his vision.

November

Here's what we were rambling on about in what the Finns call "marraskuu" - the "month of the dead" - and what Xhosa-speaking South Africans call "ngeyeNkanga" - the "month of the small yellow daisies":

Amazon's Kindle "is the iPod of books"

BusinessWeek pronounced Kindle "the iPod of Books". The blogosphere didn't agree however.

TinyURL and the fragility of the web

TinyURL - the immensely popular link-shortening service - went down for a few hours early in the month. As a result, countless links were broken across the interweb, with many large sites affected.

Animi Causa's "Feel" seating system

The "Feel" seating system, designed by Animi Causa, caught our attention. Inspired by a molecular structure, it's made of 120 interconnected "softballs" that can be repositioned to create furniture of any shape or form.

Opensocial: It's the data, stupid

Tim O'Reilly pointed out some interesting holes in the logic behind OpenSocial (Google's attempt at making social networking sites play nicely together).

Personas?

37signals said they were useless. We disagreed.

Amazing photos from French nuclear testing

Okay, so this isn't strictly user experience related, but still...Check out these incredible (yet disturbing) images of the French nuclear tests codenamed "Licorne", that took place on 24th August, 1970, in French Polynesian waters.

User-hostile battery strength indicators

You heard it here first (probably): Mobile phone manufacturers lie about battery strength to make it look like their products charge better.

Blendie: A growl-activated blender

Blendie is a blender built by Kelly Dobson that works when you growl at it.

Locking users in

A report from Privacy International described how popular websites were failing to provide an easy or obvious way for users to delete their accounts. Why would a website want to hang onto a soon-to-be-dormant account? We attempted to explain.

Jeep's parking space ads

Jeep delivered a brilliant guerrilla advertising campaign.

December

And finally, here are the best posts from the last month of the year (unless you count Undecember):

Internet Explorer 8 passes the Acid2 test

Thank the Lord! (This was great news when you consider some of the confusing statements coming out of Redmond earlier in the year).

Bring back the browser wars!

The web would be a whole lot better if we left browser manufacturers alone to develop non-standard features. Discuss (25 marks).

Take-a-Seat

...If you can catch one! Jelte van Geest's "Take-a-Seat" is a chair that follows you around.

Why the iPhone didn't ship with GPS

If you were wondering why the iPhone didn't ship with GPS technology, wonder no more.

DNA-based social networking

New York Times Magazine reported on the wave of new social-networking sites based not on friendship, business connections or dating desires but on cheek-swab DNA tests!

Kindle swindle

The first major example of tagging turning against a company?

OLPC field research reveals flaws

The OLPC team shipped its first major laptop order to Uruguay at the start of December. Despite this however, a number of threats to the project remain.

The long wow

Brandon Schauer believes that long-term customer loyalty can only be achieved through systematically impressing your customers over the course of many interactions - and that it can't be artificially manufactured by simply creating a loyalty program. But is he right?

Moneygami

Check out the subtle art of money-folding portraiture.

Wikipedia is dominating search

New research revealed that, for any given query, there's a 27% chance that the first result returned by Google will come from Wikipedia! We examined the implications.

A Blind Call: Accidental charity

We all do it: forget to lock our cell phone keypad and accidentally call the first person in our contact list. But this doesn't mean that we have to waste money in the process. Why not donate the call charges to charity instead?

Nokia's misleading survey

Nokia released the results of a study on multi-tasking behaviour in the form of a press release entitled "Survey results confirm it: Women are better multi-taskers than men". Unfortunately, it turns out that their research didn't really support such a claim.